Showdown: PM Orbán to meet EPP President Tusk in March

Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán will meet Donald Tusk, the president of the European People’s Party, at the next EU summit on March 26 or 27, Orbán’s press secretary Bertalan Havasi told Euronews.

The EPP’s leadership has yet to react to Orbán’s memorandum to the party published this Tuesday, two days ahead of the EU summit that began on Thursday. While there was some speculation that the two could meet during the summit, Havasi said Orbán’s previously scheduled coordination meeting with the Visegrad Four leaders and the busy agenda of the budget debate itself left no time for a separate meeting with Tusk.

In the memorandum Orbán reproached the EPP for gradually giving up its core Christian and national values, pointing out that it has embraced a number of left-wing concepts over the years, including gender ideology and pro-migration stances.

“We gave up the family model based on matrimony of one woman and one man, and fell into the arms of gender ideology. Instead of supporting the birth of children, we see mass migration as the solution to our demographic problem,” Orbán wrote.

He also singled out Donald Tusk for bringing Polish domestic policy conflicts and interests into the EPP and urged for an honest introspection and debate about the group’s future direction.

On Wednesday, the Fidesz party vice-president in charge of foreign affairs, Katalin Novák, said that Fidesz is in fact waiting for a response to Orbán’s thought-provoking missive from both the leaders of the EPP and its member parties.

“It is also a fact that we will not wait impassively forever,” Novák said, adding that should the EPP not be receptive to the ideas of the memorandum, “there will be other partners”.

Title image: Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán (L) and Donald Tusk (R), the President of the European People’s Party at a previous meeting in Brussels. (AP Photo/Virginia Mayo)